


take a byte

by isawet



Category: Batman (Movies 1989-1997)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-10
Updated: 2019-05-10
Packaged: 2020-02-29 07:58:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18774502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isawet/pseuds/isawet
Summary: There’s nothing like being Batgirl, nothing that even comes close.





	take a byte

**Author's Note:**

  * For [VampirePaladin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/VampirePaladin/gifts).



> I loved Batman Forever and Batman & Robin when I was a kid, so it was fun to dip back in. Extra special thanks to my emotional support noodle, who outlined and beta-ed and cheered me on <3.

Barbara’s cycle has purple accents. “She’d look good in red too,” Dick says, but it’s not the grumble she thought it might be. He’s grinning instead, boyishly excited, astride his own bike, the flares of red across the tank just the same as the ones on his chest. 

“The girl or the bike?” Batman asks. 

Barbara grins; revs the engine to feel her new baby purr. “You’re both jealous because you know you can’t keep up.”

Dick scoffs. “I’ll lap you or I’ll give up my share of Alfred’s post-patrol cookies when we get back.”

“Alfred gives me cookies whenever I want.”

Dick gapes, insulted and betrayed. “I’ll lap you twice then, just for that.”

“If you can,” Barbara shoots back. “Boys may shoot off fast but girls can go more than once.”

“None of us are going anywhere,” Batman cuts in, “if you two are just going to stand around making funnies about it.”

“Making funnies,” Dick whispers to her in an aside. “What year was he born in, you figure?”

“The twenties if he’s a day,” she murmurs back, not moving her mouth. Behind the cowl, Bruce is looking upwards for guidance.

“Kids,” he sighs, and vaults into the Batmobile.

++

There’s nothing like being Batgirl, nothing that even comes close.

And there’s nothing like Gotham, its bright colors and brighter violence, the gleaming red of blood under the moonlight and the neon. The crack her fist makes across someone’s face, Dick’s whoop as he flips off the wall beside her. 

After, they get burgers. There’s nothing quite like going through a drive through in full costume, either.

“I got you a milkshake,” Dick says, when they’re back in the Cave. It’s half gone and there’s a streak under his ear that suggests he tried drinking it on the bike at eighty miles an hour (on her heels, she lapped him twice while he laughed and let her). It’s also vanilla. “To stay PC,” he tells her with a wink.

“Shows what you know,” she murmurs, and lets her cheeks hollow around the straw when she drinks.

“Batgirl,” Batman calls, and she trots over to the main computer. The printer (adorned with bat ears) whirs, the console flashing an array of blinking lights. Bruce, pulling the cowl away and letting it hang down his back, gathers up the sheaf of papers and tucks them into a manila folder. “For you.”

“Hey,” Dick complains. “Where’s my solo case?”

“In the trash, under your college applications.” Bruce pushes the folder into Barbara’s hands. “Report to me in three days with your findings.” He pauses, then points at her. “No cowl legwork. Not yet.”

“Hah,” Dick comments gleefully.

“Cross my heart,” she swears solemnly. When he turns she flips Dick the bird.

++

It’s a smuggling case. Drugs, she’s guessing, although she doesn’t know why Bruce would assign her a case and not give her all the details on it. But she makes notes and jots down theories and lists of interview questions and suspects--fills four legal pads with her scribblings.

“Hm,” is all he says, when she presents it to him, meticulously typed and bullet pointed. “Why do you assume drugs?”

“I,” she falters. “It’s not drugs?”

“Why did you think it was?” He frowns, chastising. “Sloppy, lazy thinking won’t fly on this team.”

“Occam’s Razor,” she fires back. “The street gangs your intel indicated, the neighborhoods on the incident map, it all points to routine drug running.”

He stares at her, unblinking.

“Or…” Barbara searches for an answer. “Guns?”

Bruce hands her the file back. “It’s not drugs. It’s not guns.”

Barbara scowls, snatching her papers back. “If this is a test, I demand a redo.”

“It’s a test,” Bruce agrees. “It’s just not mine. I don’t know what they’re smuggling. Find out.” He leaves, his shoes clicking on the hardwood floor.

She looks around at his empty study, the crackling fire and the leather bound books. Every room in this house drips luxury, every penny that paid for her schooling and her food and a responsible sedan when she turned eighteen. Her mother grew up on the council. “He didn’t,” Barbara says aloud, “say no legwork.”

++

“I took the car for a joyride once,” Dick says from directly over her right shoulder.

Barbara does not shriek. But maybe she jumps a little. “I’m gonna make you wear a bell.”

“Promises,” Dick says cheerfully. “Whattya say? Robin and Batgirl, on the case?”

“Sorry blue eyes, but there’s some things a girl’s gotta do on her own.”

“The feminine mystique,” Dick sighs. “I’ll run interference. Just this once. And you’ll owe me.”

She kisses his cheek, watches the surprised, almost dazed pink rise in his face. “Don’t tell me Ivy was your first kiss.”

“I don’t locker talk,” he tells her, recovering with a smirk. “Just sayin’.”

“Good to know,” she says, and leaves him in her exhaust, roaring away and pointed towards the jagged Gotham skyline.

 

It doesn’t take long to find a dealer; Gotham’s slick with them, oozing out the sides and infecting the surrounding suburbs. It’s not her city, not yet, and it takes her too long to find a good perch. They’re on the move before she can snap pictures. So she scraps her original plan of observation and drags a lackey into an alley to lay the beatdown on him. 

He gives her a lead and then a plea for mercy, which she accepts. Leaves him handcuffed along a patrol route and takes to the rooftops. It’s a different kind of thrill from the bike, a different taste to the wind in her hair. 

And then the paydirt, along the river, the spray of water on the breeze. A black suitcase changing hands. The glow of green from beneath its fastenings. 

++

Alfred pours the tea. Barbara plates the sandwiches: tiny triangles of spread and sliced cucumbers, smears of sweet fruit jam across homemade crackers. 

“I don’t take sugar,” she reminds him.

“Nor milk, dear girl. I remember.” His tone is decidedly snooty. “Just like your mother,” he says, and it’s shifted to fond and grieving. 

“My offer stands,” she reminds him. “Just say the word.”

He raises an eyebrow at her, sitting across at the small table. They’re in a sunroom of some kind, one wall made of glass and overlooking the gardens. There are tomatoes, stretching up to the sun, and snap peas growing in curls along the glass. Alfred’s roses are blooming, pink and yellow rows and she can smell them in the air if she closes her eyes and concentrates. 

“And you’d leave Batgirl behind? Just like that?”

“For you?” She selects a tiny sandwich to busy her hands and to avoid locking their eyes. “Easiest choice in the world.”

Alfred’s smiling, small and quiet. “There are things in my life I regret, but my employment has never been one of them.”

“A sentiment I’m glad to hear,” Bruce says from the doorway. 

“You’d be right to hear the opposite,” Alfred says without bite, “lurking in doorways listening in. That’s not how I raised you.”

“No,” Bruce agrees, and his smile has gone sharper, more real, than the usual placid Bruce Wayne insincerity. “No it wasn’t. A word, if you don’t mind? Shop talk.”

“I’ve considering a new rule,” Alfred says, rising and taking his own cup of tea with him. “Confining such talk to downstairs, where the dankness and the damp match your subject matter.”

Dick pokes his head around the doorway to snicker. “Not the dank, right Al?”

Alfred grabs him by the ear. “With me, young sir. I think it’s time you polished all that silver you knocked over.”

“That was a year ago,” Dick protests, but he lets himself be dragged.

“Legwork,” Bruce says, once they’ve left. He’s distinctly displeased.

“I thought a vigilante was always precise.”

Bruce’s smile tightens. Then he relaxes, deliberate. He sits in Alfred’s vacated chair. “With a mind so exacting, you should be running circles around professors, not a socialite and a circus boy.”

Barbara blinks. “Dick’s from the circus?”

Bruce’s face shuts down. “Metropolis,” he says, and stands, hand cupped around a teacup. 

“Metropo--what?” Barbara twists, watching him leave. “Hey! That’s my tea!”

He doesn’t turn or respond; the door shuts behind him.

“Metropolis,” Barbara murmurs. Time to put that fancy computer Bruce insisted on buying her to good use. If she swings by to watch Alfred wave a polishing brush at a longsuffering Dick, that’s just perks of the job.

++

Barbara’s been frowning at a map of Metropolis for so long she’s got a pressure headache behind her eyes. 

“Babs,” Dick whispers, from just outside her window. He taps a fingertip on the glass. “Babs!”

She ignores him. It’s not the sewers, not _exactly_ , but it’s--

“Hey,” Dick says, from just behind her. She hadn’t even heard him jimmy the window open. She clicks to another window, hiding what she’s doing for reasons she’s not sure about. “If you wanna Ask Jeeves, Alfred’s always a holler away.”

“Ha ha,” she says, turning in her desk chair. “You’re dripping on my carpet.”

“Bruce’s carpet,” he reminds her cheerfully. “Why are you looking at maps of Metropolis?”

Barbara sighs. Too much to hope for that he’d not notice. “Why are you crawling around on the outside of the mansion?”

“It’s a ‘Manor’, actually.”

“What’s the difference?”

Dick shrugs. “You’re the one from Oxford. How should I know?” He shakes his head like a dog, shedding water droplets from his closely shorn hair.

“You should let that grow out,” Barbara decides, standing up and leaning in close.

His eyes get all big the way they do, a puppy with a mean right hook who trips over himself when she looks at him from underneath her lashes. “I… should?”

“Yeah.” She drags a hand over his head, the fuzz across her palm. “It’d look good, I bet.”

He tries to recover. “Sure, little girl. I’ll grow mine long and you cut yours short.” His tone, brash and cocky in exactly the same way that made her dismiss him when they first met, is at odds with his fingers, careful and gentle when he pulls her hair back. “We’ll swapsies.”

“Swapsies,” she repeats, amused despite herself. 

“Sure, that’s what they used to call it back home.” He sneaks a pen off her desktop, then produces a lollipop and offers it to her. “Swapsies.”

She takes it, wrinkling the wax paper in her fingers. It’s cherry watermelon, bright pink and shiny when she laves her tongue across it. Circus boy, Bruce had said. “And where was home, for you?”

Dick smiles, bright and cheery, the striking blue of his eyes. Robin’s egg blue, Barbara thinks. “Oh here and there, really. All over. You gonna tell me what you’re really workin’ on?”

“Nope.”

He winks at her. “I love a mystery.”

She backs him up out of her room, hand on his chest while he pretends to fight the retreat, until he’s through the doorframe. “Some things are secrets for a reason, right?” Like how he and Bruce never talk about how they started working together.

“Right,” Dick agrees. Then he backflips over the railing, the iron chandelier creaking with his weight as he swoops away. He does a handspring on his way through the doorway to the Batcave. 

“Someday he will have tempted gravity once too many,” Alfred grumbles, and begins to dust the bannister.

“Sure,” Barbara agrees. “And you’ll have to clean it up, too.”

He points at her with the duster. “Quite.”

She ducks back into her room with a last fond smile, then turns her monitor back on. She’s got work to do.

++

“Metropolis,” Barbara exclaims, turning on the lights.

Bruce sits up in bed, distinctly less put together than she’s ever seen him. “Huh?”

“Metropolis,” Barbara repeats, sitting on the end of his bed with a bounce, crossing her legs underneath her. His hair looks incredibly stupid. “Superman. Glowing green briefcases.” She pauses for dramatic effect. “ _Kryptonite_.”

“Impeccable deductions. Now get out of my room before I kill you.”

“I want to keep the case,” she says stubbornly. “You gave it to me, let me see it through.”

“Absolutely not. Dick’s been training for twice as long, and--”

Barbara scoffs. “Maybe someday Robin will be a detective. But for now I’m better and we all know it.”

Bruce rubs at his eyes with a grimace. “Legwork. No confrontations, no costumes. Barbara Wilson, intrepid reporter.”

“Intrepid reporter?”

A lanyard has appeared in his hand, press credentials in the plastic pouch. What was he doing, keeping that under his pillow? Barbara doesn’t like to be seen coming, but she swallows her pride and accepts the offering. 

++

Barbara and Alfred play chess after tea. She’s never been one for the game, too slow and dragging for her drive to go harder, go faster, go until you can’t remember the things that got you feeling down. 

At her mother’s funeral, he held her hand and counted for her, the inhale hold exhale of her shuddering ragged breathing. 

And now he teaches her again: stop, hold, think two moves ahead and play a long game. He still beats her more times than they draw. 

“What do you think I should do?” she asks him. 

He takes her rook. “Look across the bay,” he advises. “Check.”

“Cryptic,” she teases, moving a pawn to intercept. “It’s like you already know what my plans are.”

“I always have.” He reaches under the table and retrieves a small rucksack. “Provisions for the road.”

Barbara topples her king. She kisses his cheek goodbye.

 

Dick’s waiting in the garage with a forlorn expression. “Why do you push against it so hard?”

Barbara drops her pack to the floor. “You’re pretty, but I don’t need a boyfriend. I need--” she stumbles. 

“You’re the prettiest girl I ever saw,” he tells her, and he’s oddly earnest, in his tank top and his leather jacket, a size too big and a style too old fashioned to be truly his. “But there’s girls and then there’s Robin.” He hands her a motorcycle helmet, then scratches the back of his head. “I meant being partners, that’s all. Never fly alone, you know?”

“I don’t,” she says, pulling the helmet on and picking up her bag. Boarding schools and phone calls on Christmas, while Bruce got Alfred’s cooking and her grandmother’s hot chocolate recipe. “I’ve always flown alone.”

“Wait,” he says, and that’s how she can tell he’s not from Gotham same as her, because he keeps extending his hand after it’s been slapped away. He offers her a set of keys. “The Indian. I souped her up myself.”

She takes the keys.

++

Barbara’s heard the jokes, of course, enough to learn that people like to think of Gotham as Metropolis’s deformed goth sibling in the basement, to learn why they’re funny and crack a few of her own. But it’s nothing like being in Metropolis proper. 

Metropolis _shines_.

The sky is bullet blue endless, the sun high in the sky. The buildings glint, twinkling and gleaming, all bright chrome and polished glass; the streets are smooth and clean.

“I think there’s glitter in the goddamn concrete,” Barbara tells Bruce when she calls to to check in and confirm her arrival. 

“Careful,” he says just before signing off. “You’re starting to sound like a Gothamite.”

 

She drops her stuff off at her hotel and hits the streets, camera around her neck and sunglasses firmly settled on her face. Plays tourist for an hour or two before slowly meandering towards her target: a club downtown, in what the internet told her was the seediest part of Metropolis.

Compared to the parts of Gotham she’s taken to hanging around in, it might as well be the set of the Andy Griffith Show. She takes some pictures of the exterior, the entrances, the fire escape. She moseys around to take a look at the back alley when she stumbles upon a mugging.

“Please stop,” the girl is saying, her hands awkwardly hovering in the air while a man grabs at her purse. “My bus pass is in there!”

“Hey,” Barbara says, and throws a rock at him. It nails him in the side of the head, sending him sideways with a howl of pain. 

“Oh dear,” the girl frets. She moves towards her attacker, ignoring Barbara’s shouted warning. “Are you okay? Do you need--” he lunges, shoving her, and the rock must have thrown off his balance because the girl barely budges at the touch, turning to watch him beat feet out of there. “Oof,” she says belatedly.

“So there is crime in Metropolis.” Barbara dusts herself off. “Are you okay?”

The girl is blonde, young--maybe Barbara’s age--, and looks distinctly out of place. “I’m okay,” she says, smiling. It’s a nice smile. “You were incredible. How’d you do that?”

“Softball,” Barbara lies. “I’m Barbara.”

“Kara,” the girl says, as they shake hands. “Kara Danvers.”

“Where are you headed?” Barbara asks. “Let me walk you.”

“I’m headed here, actually.” Kara pulls a lanyard out from under her blouse, a badge hanging from it. “I’m a journalist. Working on a story.”

Barbara produces her own badge. “Funny, that.”

Kara’s eyes sharpen. “Let’s go across the street,” she says. “They’ve got good waffles.”

 

Barbara declines the waffles. She orders a coffee, black, then watches Kara pour four packets of sugar into her own mug. “I tracked them here from Gotham.”

“Gotham,” Kara says. “I’ve always wanted to go.”

Barbara blinks. “Really?”

“Sure. I’d like to go everywhere, eventually. But Gotham’s just so mysterious.”

“It smells like trash burning,” Barbara confides. “Like, all the time. There is so much rollerblading.” When Kara laughs she smiles.

“Is there any way I could convince you to cede the story to me? Homeground advantage and all that?”

“I don’t think that’s how hometown advantage works.” Barbara sips her coffee, considering the options. She’s not supposed to be Batgirl in this city anyway. “How about a team-up?”

“One night,” Kara proposes. “And one night only.”

“To a full monty,” Barbara agrees. They clink their coffee cups together.

++

By the time they’ve hashed out a plan and settled their tab, the club is open, the music pumping out onto the street and the smattering of smokers lurking by the entrance. Barbara grabs Kara by the arm and drags her into a darkened storefront. “What’s the problem,” Kara asks, and when she stops moving Barbara’s yanked back. 

“Geez, work out much?”

“It’s good for you,” Kara says earnestly. 

“Well your body isn’t the problem. Your outfit is.”

Kara looks down at herself. “It is?”

“No worries.” Barbara pulls Kara’s coat off, balling it up and stuffing it into her backpack. She undoes the first two buttons of Kara’s blouse, untucks it from her slacks. Then she shoves her backpack into Kara’s hands. “Hold this.” She ruffles her hair, undoing it from its braid and letting it fall down around her shoulders in waves. Then she ties up her shirt, turning it into a crop top that bares her belly. “Okay. Ready.”

“We sure are,” Kara says, and tugs Barbara’s sunglasses off. “Tell me something, Gotham. Everybody from your town this bossy?”

“Oh Metropolis,” Barbara says, taking her glasses back and tucking them away. “There ain’t nobody from no town like me.”

++

Barbara can feel the bass in her chest. The music is fast and too loud and the lights jump across the moving bodies, multicolored and strobing. Kara moves through the dance floor too quickly, and Barbara has a fleeting frustrated thought that she’s being ditched on purpose, but then a hand reaches back, closing around her wrist and pulling her close. 

“C’mon,” Kara half yells, directly into Barbara’s ear. “The offices are in the back.”

They slip into a hallway off the main room, the music cutting back to still loud but tolerable levels. “How’d you know about this?” Barbara asks. “You said earlier you’d never been inside before.”

“Oh,” Kara says vaguely. She’s staring intently at a brick wall. “Did I? C’mon, the stairs are over here.” She leads them around the corner and sure enough, a set of stairs. 

“You’re hiding something,” Barbara tells her in a whisper as they climb up to the second level. “Fair warning, I’ve never not cracked a case.” She’s never had a case before, but Kara doesn’t need to know that.

She slows outside a closed door, but Kara shakes her head, taking her by the hand. “Not that one.” She points to another. “That one.”

The lock is a keypad. “Stand back,” Barbara says. “Having me along just made you lucky.” She pops the panel open and examines the tiny wires within.

“Strong nails,” Kara comments. “Gel or acrylic?”

“All natural.” Barbara connects two wires and the door hisses open. “After--”

Kara’s eyes go wide. “We gotta go,” she says, grabbing Barbara by the elbow and dragging her back towards the stairs. 

Barbara tries to dig her heels in, to no avail. “The case,” she protests, and then, “Jesus, where are you _from_?”

“Kansas,” Kara says tensely. “And there’s goons on the way who won’t be too impressed, so how about you stop squawking at me and start cooperating.”

Barbara gets her feet under her. “Bossy for a farm girl,” she says, and then a bullet whistles by her ear and buries itself into the wall. She yelps, turning--there’s a man with a smirk and a gun, the curls of ink from his wrists to his elbows, the mean hard glint in his eye--this is going to kill Alfred, she thinks, watching the barrel aimed at her chest, watching his finger around the trigger. 

Then her view of the gun cuts out, obscured by Kara’s shoulders--broader than Barbara thought they were, the peach fuzz hairs on the back of her neck. The crack of the shot and Barbara's already moving, pulling them sideways. “Kara,” she says frantically, fumbling her hand across Kara’s chest, searching for the wound. “C’mon, you’re okay.”

“Um,” Kara says. “You’re kind of groping me.”

Barbara yanks her hand back, flustered. “If I was groping you, you’d know it.” She blinks. The gunman is lying prone on the floor, unconscious. “What the--” She turns back. There’s a hole in Kara’s blouse, but the skin underneath is unbroken. There’s a bullet next to her shoe, flat as quarter. 

“Um,” Kara says again. Then she sighs. “Can we talk about this outside?”

++

Barbara calls Dick from the hotel phone. “Miss me yet?”

“Every minute of every day.”

Barbara smiles. “Bruce getting on your nerves, huh?”

“It’s his only true superpower. I don’t know how Alfred’s put up with him all these years.”

“You know what’d get you out of the house?” Barbara flops onto the bed, winding the cord of the phone around her finger. “College.”

Dick sighs, long and blown out and performative. Then he hesitates. “You wanna hear a secret?”

“Sure.”

“I never went to school,” he confesses. “Not ever. No college would even let me through the gates.”

“You--not even kindergarten?” Barbara sits up, a terrible thought striking her. “Oh my god, can you read?”

“Of course I can read!” Dick sounds like she’s just insulted his mother. “I can read and--and do math and stuff, okay? I just never went to school.” Homeschool, she realizes, and oh, maybe she did just insult his mother.

“I never figured you being from religion,” she says, rolling onto her stomach and kicking her feet idly in the air. 

“Not quite,” Dick says vaguely. 

“Gypsies,” Barbara guesses, smiling. “From all over and your secrets held close.”

“Closer,” Dick says, but his voice has cooled.

Barbara stills, frowning. “Dick?”

“It’s fine,” he says. “Just--nevermind. It’s fine. Why did you call?”

She called to talk to Bruce, but she doesn’t want to end their conversation like this. “You know I’m smarter than you, right?”

“Right,” he agrees, without hesitating, and she’s smiling again. 

“If you did want to try college, you’ve got the best tutor in the country just a skip hop and jump away.”

“Skip hop and jump past Alfred’s rifle,” Dick mutters, but his tone is brighter. “I’ll keep it in mind, B.G.. Oh hey, Bruce! Babs is on the line.”

“Babs,” Bruce intones thoughtfully into the line.

“Dick’s creation. Smack him in training for me.”

“Always. Developments?”

There’s a stick of gum in Barbara’s pocket, bent in half from being squished against her hip. Kara had given it to her. There’s an address written on the wrapper in ballpoint pen. Barbara cracks the gum between her teeth, unfolds the wrapper to look at the address, the smudged digits in Kara’s hand. “You know Metropolis,” she says, carefully neutral. “Maybe I’ll get lucky and meet a Super.”

There’s a brief pause. “Meeting Superman would be something,” Bruce says finally. “I myself have only had the pleasure once.”

“Actually,” Barbara says, “I was thinking maybe I’d set my hopes on a different one. Better odds, right?”

“Hm,” Bruce says. “Be careful. Metropolis isn’t Gotham, but it isn’t Oxford, either.”

“Shows what you know about Oxford.”

“Hm,” Bruce says again, and then there’s a slight crackling on his end, movement and muttered voices.

“Miss me yet?” Dick asks, and Barbara laughs. 

“Like a hole in the head.” She looks down at the bullet in her hand, scooped off the floor of the club, flat and smooth and stopped by nothing more than Kara’s skin. “You wanna hear a secret?”

“I showed you mine.”

“I’ve got a case.”

Dick scoffs. “That’s not a secret.”

“There’s a super.”

DIck sucks in a breath. “Girls really do get all the luck.”

“Says who?” Barbara asks sharply, then she sighs. “I like to go fast,” she tells him. Motorcycles and running sprints and coding, there’s not a faster typist in the hemisphere. Computers and racing and the sweet metallic tang of blood on her tongue after a good fight. A whirlwind, her mother had called her, a dervish. No one’s ever been able to keep up, not ‘til now.

“No kidding. You could lap Bruce if you wanted.”

Barbara smiles, quiet and pleased. “You’re not so bad, Grayson.”

“Tell Al that, wouldya? Last week I went down for a glass of milk and he was waiting outside my door like a hall monitor, guarding your honor.”

“Shows what he knows,” Barbara says. “You always come through the window.”

Dick laughs, bright and singsong. A robin’s song. “Whattaya say, Babs? A team up?”

Barbara drags her finger across the gum wrapper. _Kal’s never going to let me hear the end of this,_ Kara had grumbled, and offered to take her to waffles in the morning. 

“Buy your ticket,” she agrees. “Bring the suits. A team up.”

“Gotham’s finest,” Dick agrees. They hang up at the same time.

++

“There’s a thing,” Barbara says, sliding into the booth across from Kara. The diner smells like coffee and scrambled eggs, the tabletop linoleum is cracked and faded. “That people say I do.”

Kara flags a waitress down. “Coffee? I go for hot chocolate.”

“Two please,” Barbara orders. She waits until the waitress has left to speak again. “Do you want to know?”

“About the thing?” Kara smiles, teasing and warm. “Absolutely; I’m curious by nature.”

“It’s more a thing they say I don’t do.”

“Let people in,” Kara guesses. Her smile widens. “I could tell from our first hello.”

“I saved you from a mugging,” Barbara grumbles.

Kara hums, drumming her fingers against the table. “Did you?”

The waitress arrives with two mugs of hot chocolate, the cups rattling against the saucers. 

Barbara leans over and exhales, catching the steam rising off the heated milk and breathing it back onto the tabletop where it fogs. In the condensation, she draws the outline of a bat.

Kara’s breath catches. Then she smiles, and this time it’s razor sharp, bright as the sun and just as hard to look at straight on. “I heard about that,” she says quietly. “You can see the signal here from across the bay. I covered it for my school’s newspaper, the two smaller bats hiding in his wings.”

“One bat,” Barbara corrects. “One bird.”

“Metropolis shines under a different sign,” Kara warns. Her finger moves across her chest like a river, the _S _shaped flow of the House of El.__

__Barbara raises her hands. “I tracked it from Gotham, I’m not looking to expand. Not against someone who drinks hot chocolate first thing in the morning? How old are you, anyway?”_ _

__“Hey,” Kara objects. “You ordered it too.”_ _

__“It’s not for me,” Barbara says, and right on cue Dick slips into the booth beside her. His motorcycle helmet clunks on the tabletop._ _

__“Dick Grayson,” he greets, shooting Kara his biggest brightest smile. “Babs didn’t say her new friend was a looker.”_ _

__“I did, actually,” Barbara tells her. “Surefire way to get him to show up.”_ _

__“Shh,” Dick says, “no need to be jealous. You’ll always be my number one girl.” He sniffs the air, then perks up. “Hot chocolate!” He snags the mug in front of Barbara and takes a sip, sighing happily._ _

__Barbara and Kara share an amused look. “Okay Grayson,” Kara says. “Welcome to the party.”_ _

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed :). I'm on tumblr @ sunspill.


End file.
